When Gérard Houllier took sole charge of Liverpool in November 1998, the first player he signed was a Frenchman who had captained Nantes to the league title three years earlier.
Jean-Michel Ferri was 29 and had five France caps. He played twice for Liverpool, both times from the bench, and was gone the following summer.
Less than an hour of football in a red shirt, then. But there is a good deal more to his story than that.
A Nantes man
Ferri was born in Lyon on 7 February 1969 and came from Vénissieux, on the edge of the city.
His boyhood idol was Henri Michel, the Nantes great, and it was Nantes he joined as a youngster. Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly were among those coming through the club’s academy at around the same time.
He made his league debut in the 1987-88 season, aged 19, and went on to play close to 300 league games for the club.
Captain of a golden generation
Under Jean-Claude Suaudeau, Nantes built one of the most admired sides in French football, a team of players who had grown up together at the club, with Christian Karembeu, Reynald Pedros, Patrice Loko and Nicolas Ouédec among them.
Ferri was the man in front of the defence, and he wore the armband.
In 1994-95 Nantes swept to the title. They lost just one league game all season, away to Strasbourg, and Loko finished as the division’s top scorer with 22 goals.
A night against Juventus
The following season Nantes went all the way to the Champions League semi-finals, where they met Juventus.
They lost the first leg 2-0 in Turin, then beat the Italians 3-2 at home. It wasn’t quite enough. Ferri started the second leg in midfield, and in the Juventus side that night was his old academy team-mate Deschamps. Juve went on to lift the trophy.
Five caps for France
His international chance came in his mid-twenties. Ferri made his France debut against Chile on 22 March 1994 and won five caps in all.
That year he was also part of the France side that won the Kirin Cup in Japan.
Trouble in Turkey
In the summer of 1998, after more than a decade in the Nantes first team, Ferri tried his luck abroad with Istanbulspor.
It went wrong almost straight away. He found himself left out of the side. By November he was on his way.
Ferri across the Mersey
Houllier had been left in sole charge after Roy Evans departed in mid-November, and he moved quickly. Ferri was his first signing, arriving from Istanbulspor in late November 1998, and the headline writers had their fun: “Ferri across the Mersey”.
He could play at the back as well as in midfield, and he was brought in as cover for the captain, Paul Ince.
That same week a local lad called Steven Gerrard made his debut as a late substitute against Blackburn at Anfield. Nobody knew it yet, but the future of Liverpool’s midfield had just stepped on to the pitch.
A debut at the Bridge
Ferri came to Anfield carrying an injury, and he had to wait three months for his first game.
It came at Stamford Bridge on 27 February 1999. Liverpool were 2-0 down at half-time, and when Ince went off injured three minutes after the restart, on came Ferri.
At the heart of the Chelsea defence was Marcel Desailly, another old face from those Nantes academy days. Michael Owen pulled a goal back, but Chelsea held on to win 2-1.
Eight minutes at Hillsborough
His second and last appearance came in the penultimate game of the season, at Sheffield Wednesday on 8 May 1999.
Gerrard was in the starting line-up that day. Ferri replaced Jamie Redknapp with eight minutes left, and a late goal from Richard Cresswell won it 1-0 for Wednesday.
Sochaux and home
That summer Ferri moved to Sochaux, then in the French second division.
He retired in 2000 and went home to the Lyon area, where he went on to coach in the amateur game, with spells at Feyzin, Minguettes Vénissieux and FC Corbas.
Once a Red
Jean-Michel Ferri’s Liverpool career amounts to two substitute appearances and less than an hour on the pitch. Nobody would pretend otherwise.
But he was the first signing of the Houllier era. The years that followed would bring a cup treble in 2001. And long before he came to Anfield, he had captained one of the great French sides to the title and taken on Juventus in a Champions League semi-final.
Not a bad CV for a footnote. Once a Red, always a Red.
